Unless otherwise indicated herein, the materials described in this section are not prior art to the claims in this application and are not admitted to be prior art by inclusion in this section.
Mainstream computer use is evolving from individually managed, stand-alone computing devices to connected devices that access software and/or data via a network connection. “Cloud computing” refers to a computing model in which computing resources may be accessed via a network connection. Resources available from the network may be referred to as “in the cloud”.
Behind a network connection, a “cloud” may comprise professionally managed hardware and software. Data center/infrastructure providers may supply hardware infrastructure itself, e.g., racks and rows of servers comprising processors, memory, cabling, cooling systems, raw storage, firewalls, and load balancers. “Platform as a Service” (PaaS) providers may supply platform layers that use infrastructure provider hardware. Platform layers may include, for example, computing platforms such as operating systems, programming language execution environments, databases, and web servers. “Software as a Service” (SaaS) providers may supply software layers that use platform providers' platforms. SaaS software layers may include, for example, application software implementing network services that can be made available in a cloud to client applications operated by end users and/or other network services.